The Visitor

By Carolyn Forché b. 1950 Carolyn Forche

In Spanish he whispers there is no time left.

It is the sound of scythes arcing in wheat,

the ache of some field song in Salvador.

The wind along the prison, cautious

as Francisco’s hands on the inside, touching

the walls as he walks, it is his wife’s breath

slipping into his cell each night while he

imagines his hand to be hers. It is a small country.

There is nothing one man will not do to another.

1979

Carolyn Forche, “The Visitor” from The Country Between Us, published by Copper Canyon Press. Copyright © 1981 by Carolyn Forché. Reprinted by permission of the William Morris Agency, LLC.

Source: The Country Between Us (Copper Canyon Press, 1981)

Biography

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, poet, teacher and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history. According to Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times Book Review, Forché’s ability to wed the “political” with the “personal” places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov. An articulate . . .

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